NEW POETRY FROM KEVIN CAHILL

KEVIN CAHILL was born in Cork City. He studied at University College Cork, and later worked with the European Commission. Recently he has been working as a reiki practitioner. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Orbis, The SHOp, Edinburgh Review, Crannóg, Agenda, and Berkeley Poetry Review. He is currently seeking a publisher for his début collection titled Tsk.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

i.m. Ernest Dowson and Adelaide Foltinowicz

If you drown him in vodka an abominal hand in a bun shop dickers with a proprietor for a bun. This is two months before he died. If you dunk him in ice he is roaring with the love of a toothless, sick, dying variety that felt right…twenty months before he died…if you duck her in soup the matter and mark of a catheter is about her some months after he’s died…if we hoick her up by the forelocks her spotlessness, bottle-green eyes, and freckled nose grow big with abortions, some time after he’s died…if he’s smacked with sal volatile he sucks on the end of his stub and sends our schoolgirl Virgilian verses…if he’s pushed alexandrines…if we bring her round she’s no longer twelve…destined in the womb to marry the waiter and open her idyll like a pore, if we shock him once…he’s cocked up like a torso in a bag…on the Thames…handing her clotted cream and compote on a perfectly-composed scone cooked on his knees, if we wake him …green fairy, if we…darkness pricked remarkably with a Dickens, digested fags, ipecacuanha wine and a bloody bedsheet sat on by an angel of a woman holding his head…if we slice him open his one life goes for a duck but gave us parasols to watch flutter and fold up.

Annie Dowson*

Gay, green, seeping, filled with sand, Alfred’s mouth, swilling the chloral back and making his manhood wet with wishing. Moistening you faintly. When you hanged yourself from the railed bedstead Ernest was due to call… the carpenter splintered the door and we found you on the lily-broidered kerchief preserved like a flower.

The coroner made nothing of it, but he might have said you suffered being you, and not the world: a little flower tied up like a suckling, a little flower tied up like a flensing knife – emptying your life from the bedside pan, abhorring yourself, abhorring your life.

Not life.

Wormwood

i.m. Ernest Dowson

Part of a century turning the drawers over on a complicit romping and covered-up shag-fest.

He dragged his hangdog to the Cheese, perched on a stool, in a cabman’s shelter, or barstool, and lived nowhere.

always by Puckish games as she crazed only him, and grew to abortions in the hole of backrooms

he didn’t live to see. At dawn, half-illumined at lanterns, he sat damned, read Dickens, blood on his lips

strung the last day… each drop a blossom of roses perhaps, (not vanities), pearl-spores

on a girl’s wrist.

*Note to poem: Annie Dowson was Ernest Dowson’s mother. Alfred, his father, died due to the ingestion of chloral hydrate, and Annie, died due to hanging six months later.

All works published by the Glasgow Review of Books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and the journal reserves the right to be named as place of first publication in any citation. Copyright remains with the poet. http://www.glasgowreviewofbooks.com